Eleventy might not receive new features, your website will still work.

It's somewhat counterintuitive, but the added complexity leads to simpler projects that are easier to maintain long term. I have simple markdown files, and a separate, code-based conversion process that works well for me.

Also the documentation for eleventy was always confusing to me. I almost got the impression that "it's so simple, we don't have to explain it". Whereas astro's documentation is much more accesible; there were a handful of cases where there was something I wanted to do and astro had an example of exactly that. I didn't have to do guesswork, just follow the examples in the way the creators intended. Stuff like that is important.

  <a href="there">description</a>

When I really needed a landing page that looked like it fell off a UFO I did it in Vite-React (such a joy to use semantic components, like write

   <Event date="2026-04-18">Earth Day Parade Ithaca Commons</Event>

That is, SSG has no commercial potential because any individual or organization which is capable of maintaining and customizing an SSG can create one from scratch that does exactly what they need with less cost and effort and success is only possible through hypnotizing people into thinking otherwise -- in many fields of software this happens every day but I think not SSG, like those people are going to stay asleep and dream of Drupal and Wordpress.

[1] ... and if I want to move to some similar platform I just implement it instead of struggle with "plugins" and "modules" and other overcomplicated extension mechanisms

For those who post regular updates on those sites, there are great and cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.

I truly don't understand how the same folks that champion accessibility and humane ideals while humble bragging about working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online can throw so much shade on people who are urgently trying to figure out a way to get paid, often just to keep the projects that they created alive so that these people can continue to use them for free.

I don't know if it's entitlement, projection or just wanting to have it both ways, but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming instead of being shitty about people doing their best to find a forever home before their burnout finally kicks in.

> “We believe that open source should be sustainable and open source maintainers should get paid!”

> Maintainer: introduces commercial features “Not like that”

> Maintainer: works for a large tech co “Not like that”

> Maintainer: takes investment “Not like that”

I wish them the best.

Unfortunately I don't think anyone feels strongly enough about 11ty to fight for it when the next SSG is a few Claude Code prompts away.

Follow up (by OP) Cancelled (5 points, 1 month ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282675

Related Introducing: Build Awesome (3 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47245750

And I can choose whether or not to use NPM. I've thought of moving from it a few times. But it's just better and solid.

But the other side to this coin is us having problem making money. It's muddy waters for sure. For example, Manjaro Linux was dragged through the mud after they started their company. Not to mention, On the other hand, just like SSG's like Hugo and 11ty, Netlify and Vercel and others are responsible for a ton of free sites (like mine). They need to not just eat, they should be able make a luxurious life if that's what they want.

I am not against anyone trying to make money off of their OSS projects. We need good companies to make money. I just hope it doesn't become anti-consumers. Which is what the OP's concern is. Can't blame him for thinking this as well.

I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.

I left it for elixir and Phoenix and never looked back. There’s just no true ownership and direction that can come close to that of Jose Valim and Chris McCord in the JS ecosystem. It’s so fragmented that it takes the fun out of maintaining a JS codebase.

[0]: https://shoelace.style/

> Imagine if Build Awesome actually reached out to people who regularly make static sites. You know, the userbases on NeoCities or MelonLand or 32-bit Cafe?

One minute you are saying large companies use the product, the next that it was always for hobbyists and shouldn't target corporate features?

> In truth, I myself have started a business that has a near identical concept to Build Awesome. Berry House is my independent web studio

> The difference is though that my model is pay-what-you-can, or pro bono. I developed Calgary Groups for a client and charged $5/hour for my dev work.

That is not a business -- no profit motive. (Working less than minimum wage, even.) Not a good benchmark for comparing what an actual business like Font Awesome should do.

https://github.com/shawwn/pg

It’s basically a reimplementation of Viaweb, pg’s first startup.

I did it for fun, but I’ll probably use it for my own site. I’m not sure how fast other SSGs run, but this one only takes 15 seconds to build all ~260 essays and such.

Thinking of doing a Show HN. Not sure if it’s interesting enough. No AI except for the finishing touches (importing hundreds of essays and finding a few bugs).

But my only thought on this is: Eleventy is an awesome name.

The perpetual "this project is now dead" anxiety around OSS is becoming less warranted. Which might upset people who'd rather debate sustainability models than just fix the dep.

https://www.11ty.dev/blog/build-awesome/

Safe to say there's a number around HN who have used/are using 11ty and might have some interest.

Am grateful for Zach's dedication over the years and believer in what 11ty stands for (and more recently what webc brings to the table/ecosystem)

Don't want to expend the effort to do so? Interesting.

Perhaps people need to be more realistic about the code they consume. Treat it as a finished product, take on dependencies you can either afford to maintain or don't need to be maintained at all. Have an exit plan. Relying on someone's unpaid labor to keep your own projects afloat is your problem.

I think a lot of less technical users would love a desktop app (or a web app integrated with their hosting provider) that lets them manage their website via a GUI, preview their changes with a split-screen view, and upload to a web host. Something similar to Microsoft Frontpage or the like.

I suspect the reason that Neocities got so popular was in part because of its web editor, and having a more powerful version of that would be fantastic. If this integrated with Git to allow version tracking and multiple authors to collaborate, even better.

I'm sad to hear that the "OG 11ty era" has ended. But, as others have noted, fortunately 11ty will live on, so long as folks keep using it and hacking away at it.

Way back in 2015 I was building a large static site using Jekyll and Wordpress CMS as a backend. We had 30+ content editors using it, writing Markdown and I had Jekyll Generator that would execute a SQL query against the Wordpress database to build static content. Every new post would build and deploy the whole site in 2-3 minutes. Over 50k pages of content. This powered a very large marketing website straddling multiple top 10 Google Ad keywords. Business was bringing in several hundred million in ARR.

I knew of at least 3 other similarly large businesses doing this. All the way back in 2015. My current company today builds a static site from a Wordpress backend and I was totally uninvolved in this work (or even suggesting it). The user that this author thinks is a fable is very very real. There is absolutely a market for a CMS backend for an SSG.

Not that I as a developer would have used it, but if my employers could have paid a company for what I built in a nice box instead of paying my salary, they would have.

I'm not sure how successful they are, but pinegrow[1] is a thing. It's not worth it to me to pay $99 per year for a personal website (the only static site I want), but there are many people who have static websites that are an essential part of a profitable business and these people don't necessarily want to use the terminal.

[1]: https://pinegrow.com/

Though I also have no idea how a static website generator can raise tens of millions of dollars.

> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.

I completely disagree with this. The main problem is that these people don't want to pay for such a solution.

There's a thriving ecosystem of headless CMS for commercial websites: multi-user, support editing landing pages, etc.

Things like Decap were too basic (running it for any complex blog is a pain) and didn't solve much for developers building a Github Pages blog (while also being useless to startups).

I run three static blog websites, two personal and one for our agency. I want a CMS on all of them. I want to be able to edit from the iPad, easily upload images, etc. But my hosting itself is basically free, so hard to justify paying for a CMS.

I'm using Sveltia for all three now, it's still in early access but in my experience is much better than NetlifyCMS/Decap or PagesCMS.

I don't want to learn your project, thank you very much. If anything, I'll create my own. Nowadays, it's super easy to do it with AI, but even before AI, I would have still prefered creating my own stuff instead od using yours. I don't want you as a dependency, I don't want you to become the master of my work, I don't want to try to understand how your pitiful "project" works since it would be 10 times easier for me to write the functionality I need from scratch myself. I don't want to do a security audit for your stuff and try to understand how it works while creating my own will always negate this problem entirely. I don't want to work for your "resume" so you could proudly put your turd "project" there seeking better employment. Not at my expense, not at the expense of my time and nerves.